Do not install the Python test suite when configure is run with '--disable-test-suite'. This about divides by two the size of the installed standard library.
Related to issue 26852: add the '--enable-legacy-pyc-files' option to configure.
The attached listdirs.py script may be used to check that the set of sub-directories in the std library is not changed by the patch.

I'm in favor of allowing to build a "subset" of Python. Not only it makes sense for embedded devices, but in many cases it's even not possible to do otherwise: "full" Python is too big for small devices.
But I would prefer to see a public discussion on python-dev before going into this direction.
The previous attempt failed because some core developers were opposed to support officially a "subset of Python". But since this previous discussion (two years ago? longer?), MicroPython became popular, and this implementation of Python has a small subset of the stdlib (but it supports asyncio ;-)) Maybe it's time for a new attempt :-) Oh, and the meanwhile we also made progress on the Android port, which is now an important platform.
In short, I would like to official support Python subsets ;-) At least, add options for that.

> Ah, the discussion restarted on the other issue: http://bugs.python.org/issue20210#msg287516Issue 20210 has ended up as a change in the build system eventually and not the installation process, only a tiny step towards the configuration of a smaller Python distribution :(
After browsing again the last discussion on "[Python-ideas] size of the installation of Python on mobile devices" [1], I find all the arguments in favor of such changes still relevant. I would also add the following new arguments:
* One frequent argument used against those changes is that "[packagers for mobile and embedded devices] will have to patch the code base anyway to get things working in such an environment". But this is not true, see issue 30386 (Add a build infrastructure for Android) that proposes an addition to Python that does not modify a SINGLE LINE in the existing source code. So it is not true (or at least not anymore true) that packagers for mobile and embedded devices need to patch the code base anyway.
* When Python is installed by the termux [2] Android application on an Android device, the size of the installed standard library is 34M. The termux installation script does not install the following files [3]:
TERMUX_PKG_RM_AFTER_INSTALL="
bin/python${_MAJOR_VERSION}m bin/idle*
lib/python${_MAJOR_VERSION}/idlelib
lib/python${_MAJOR_VERSION}/test
lib/python${_MAJOR_VERSION}/tkinter
lib/python${_MAJOR_VERSION}/turtledemo
"
But it fails to not install also:
lib/python${_MAJOR_VERSION}/config-${_MAJOR_VERSION}m
lib/python${_MAJOR_VERSION}/ctypes/test
lib/python${_MAJOR_VERSION}/distutils/tests
lib/python${_MAJOR_VERSION}/sqlite3/test
lib/python${_MAJOR_VERSION}/unittest/test
This is not consistent and should be fixed by a proper (endorsed by Python) installation process.
[1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-ideas/2016-July/
[2] https://termux.com/
[3] https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/blob/master/packages/python/build.sh